Blog Comments & Posts

Google recently began a pilot program to further cement the ties between its online search functionality and the physical world. Last month, the company distributed window decals to the most popular 100,000 or so locally listed businesses. It is easy to view this program cynically--as ...

Hey Brandon. Awesome post. There is a ton of great information for musicians looking to improve their SEO efforts. We just recently published a graphic on the same topic (http://www.digitalthirdcoast.net/blog/seo-for-musicians). Would love to get some feedback on this from anyone else who has commented on this post.

Thank you for sharing this vid. I know it's a little old, but I have a question regarding internal anchor text. When linking to an important internal page from, say, a blog post, would the anchor text be discounted since elements in the header and navigation menu already link to internal pages?

Rand, great post but i'm a little confused about one thing, you don't actually have a mortgage??? I don't know why but I always pictured you owning a sweet loft style condo or something like that. Now's a great time to buy..lol.

For this wave, they are only sending out decals to the highest-ranked 100,000 local listings (based largely on user engagement). It's possible that they will allow companies to request them in the future, but so far you have to be selected.

Haven't heard anything about the UK yet. I presume that they are waiting to see how successful it is in the States, first.

While most people probably have no clue what the codes are yet, the push by Google seems to have as good a shot as anything at making them common knowledge. With the recent surge in smartphone adoption (past few years), this seems like as good a time as any for the codes.

Would be nice if there were better tools out there for discovering the long tail. Extrapolating keywords from your own data is kind of a catch 22...if you're not ranking for a keyword then you probably won't be getting any traffic for that keyword.

Nice, i think one of my favorites was the Steve Blank post about working smarter not harder and not sacrificing family for your latest startup project. That's pretty good advice that a lot of people are afraid to talk about.

I don't know...i think not having accurate ranking reports actually hurts SEO's a lot. Reporting on overall traffic and sales is great but can sometimes be innacurate. Rankings should be an important part of an SEO's reporting structure if he wants to prove his worth to a client...IMHO.

I don't know...i think not having accurate ranking reports actually hurts SEO's a lot. Reporting on overall traffic and sales is great but can sometimes be innacurate. Rankings should be an important part of an SEO's reporting structure if he wants to prove his worth to a client...IMHO.

I think these are some great examples of sites providing value and getting links in return however i think this type of strategy would be harder to implement effectively if you are an ecommerce site for example.

I'd also be extremely interested to see an eyetracking/heatmap study that explicitly compared user interaction on SERPs with and without all of the one boxes. I doubt that it would provide too much additional value beyond what could be learned from CTR in the short term, but it might provide insights for the future.

If users paid specific attention to certain OneBoxes (ie, songs) without clicking, it might indicate that these particular boxes are worth special consideration, for example.

I think as much as link building has changed it has mostly stayed the same. Rand, SEOmoz's link building tactics have evolved over time but the type of clients you are dealing with have evolved as well. The larger the company the more creative you have to be with link building because as you say "it is not scalable". The old tactics still work for a lot of people.

I believe the key is to do everything in moderation. There isn't one "latest and greatest" tactic that is going to be a silver bullet. Get links in as many different ways as possible. Start out by looking at your competitors backlinks, submit to free directories, buy some good paid directories, start a blog, then do some blog commenting, buy some relevant paid links, write some articles and distribute those, submit some press releases, etc. There are many ways to get links. All of these tactics will contribute to making your site more synonymous with it's niche.

But most of all to be synonymous with your niche I believe the best thing you can do is provide great content that people will enjoy and link to. It sounds cliche but it's still the best link building method out there. Think about it, where would SEOmoz be without it's content? People don't come here for the tools you know :-)

Great post. I like the way you tracked and normalized the data. All of your findings make sense too. I always felt that longer posts got more respect even if they weren't neccesserily as interesting or helpful.

Some business models don't really benefit that much from SEO. Any business that doesn't have clearly defined keywords suffers from this issue because people don't know what keywords to type to find them.

Most of the examples above fall into this category. They don't have much to lose by designing their sites this way and I think it works great for them. I wouldn't recommend that an e-commerce site do the same.

rstellers, I like your suggestion to submit to Bing Local especially since they will eventually have more traffic due to the Yahoo deal. Do you find that all of the above tactics work for Bing as well? Does anything seem to work better in Bing?

One thing I don't see on there is reporting. I think any SEO worth their salt should be able to provide good reporting to their clients which takes some time to put togehter. There's no better way to convince your clients that your services provide a good ROI then by showing them a chart that shows it to them in black and white.

I've had clients that are very focused on one main keyword and don't pay attention to the long tail at all. It's very frustrating because even after showing them that their main keyword only makes up about 5% of their revenue they still use that as their barometer of whether their SEO campaign is going good or not. Sure, it's still important to rank for your main keyword but it usually is only the tip of the iceberg as far as traffic and revenue.

Getting SEO involved in the development process is always hard unless the people running the project are aware of the value of doing so. I find that there is slowly starting to be more awareness of the value and ROI that SEO can bring but there is still a long way to go.

Yeah, i think reason #1 will have the biggest impact on my business as an SEO. If Yahoo/Bing is going to account for 25% - 30% of search you better believe my clients are going to be more interested in ranking well.

I think a lot of "SEO's" read and write a lot about SEO but don't neccesserily do any of the work. If you've never been in the trenches and done the link building yourself or if you've never had to answer to a bunch of clients that want to see results then you're not an SEO...at least not a successful one. Anyone can call themselves anything, but being good at something is what sets apart the men from the boys.

Nice...very funny post. One thing that you didn't mention is the fact that the API opens it up to so many other customizable uses for agencies and companies. Sure it has it's limitations but it does what is necessary for 95% of users out there.

It almost seems like money is one of the last reasons you choose to get funding...oversight and accountability seem to be even more important. Not many CEO's can admit that they need to be kept on track. I guess that's part of what makes you successful.

I wonder why they don't give badges for the Google Analytics Individual Qualification? Especailly since they already give one for the Adwords Individual...what's the point of even taking the test in that case?

In my opinion link farming is wayyyyyy too much work and is not worth the effort. Unless you have a huge amount of resources it never really pans out. Your much better off doing some real link building.

Google still has the unique ability to bring a boat load of targeted traffic to your site for a consistently long period of time. None of the other "services" have the ability to do that. So, while they might get popular for a while, I don't think they compare in the same way. It's like comparing apples to oranges. You can't build your business on Twitter like you can on Google. Google is always going to be great for specific types of searches. Twitter might be a great way to search for information as it's happening and to be tapped into a breathing social organism, but it's not going to give me 5 plumbers in my zip code in two seconds flat or the definition of "Organic".

Good post. Another important metric is internal site search. Watching what people are searching for internally on your site and analyzing that data to make sure you are providing quality search results and the right product mix.

Wow! That's quite an extensive history lesson. I would imagine that as time goes on things will get less and less turbulent although i'm sure there will still be a few shake ups here and there. Great post.

Great article. The only factor i'm not so sure I totally agree with is "Price". I've seen prices range across the board for google base products. If it's a ranking factor, my opinion is that it's a small one.

I kind of like your idea of not putting the social media icons on every post (tip #16). I'm starting to see those things in the strangest places. Why would an ecommerce store put social media tags on every product page? As if their product is going to make it to the top of digg just because there is a little digg icon...lol.

I also think that all of the tips above are not going to work unless you have good writing...it all comes down to the writing.

Twittering something is a lot easier than blogging about something. You can't just blog one line about something and get your point across. Twitter has the remarkable ability to be short, sweet and very effective. Of course, blogging will always have it's place and won't go away. I think twittering is just the new craze these days.

great post, this really shows how with a good model, over time you can make a lot of people happy and in turn that helps you get more business. its really how it should work everytime in a perfect world.

Nice post Rand. Very useful information. I have to say, considering that Google has a tool like webmaster central to communicate with webmasters they really don't communicate that much information about penalties. I realize it's not their problem if your site loses it's rankings but they really should try and do a better job to let you know if your site has been penalized.

nice post, i think being able to target demographics is great, especially since facebook has been open to everyone for a while and not just college students like it used to be. i agree that this could be a powerful way to get the word out on age and gender specific campaigns.

I agree with your point about meeting clients...Sometimes it's not really practical because they are in other states but I definitely agree that it is good to meet them if you can. It is also a good idea to meet with potential new clients. Putting a face to your name can go a long way with closing the deal.

I think the more people view your site as an excellent and trusted resource, the more they will keep coming back to your site despite the outbound links. Excellent examples of this are provided in this article.

I think this can actually be turned into a Pro with enough practice. By proof reading your own material, you can generate new idea's for blog posts which can lead to improved grammar and proof reading skills.

I think keeping a timeline is a great idea. It is important to set goals and make sure that you are setting realistic dates in achieving them. Keeping track of both postitive and negative change is important so you can adapt and change if need be.

Yeah, that makes sense. You would think Google could come up with some sort of other way of denoting it besides "0". Maybe a different character like a "#" or something that would let you know it was traffic but it's not being counted.

Googles search is much more simple then some of the other major search engines. When you search in google, they have the search bar and basically nothing else. The process is simple. Where if you look at yahoo there is many more choices to choose from on their main page. For the average person who is just looking to find what they are searching for and be on their way, I could see why they would choose Google.

I think limited hierarcy in smaller startup companies improves communication between workers. Since there is a limited amount of people working on multiple tasks together, one's rank over another is often overlooked. People are encouraged to work together and share idea's much easier then in a corporate setting. It is important to be on the same page when the success or failure of the company is in hands of so few.

There's also an intangible quality to Obama that is not easily explained by theory. It's more than the words of his speech that make them so believable. It's the delivery as well. It's the whole package.

I agree here with Rand's theory...you're much better off putting the blog on your main domain and making it look different than the rest of the site (or less commercial). Then any links you get benefit the entire domain...and improve all of your pages rankings. it's hands down the best short and long term approach.

Good post. I definitely think there is a lot of low hanging fruit here. There are some suppliers that will feel obligated to link to you...especially if you bring them a lot of biz...so why not take advantage of that.

Mikkel, I agree with your theory but I think it's a little bit cocky to be honest. Sure, if your site has a million backlinks and tons of fresh content Google will come back every 10 seconds and all of your pages will rank instantly. Only problem is that it takes time to get to that level...and not all sites (especially big corporate sites) are so eager to go changing up their site structure. Truth is there aren't that many sites out there that are as awesome as yours. Sometimes a sitemap is a good band aid to indexing problems that might otherwise take a long time to fix.

Very nice post. I agree that it would be a great idea to try similar experiments on other types of sites such as e-commerce sites with a few thousand products and see if the faster indexing leads to more sales.

Also would be nice to hear what tools people generally use to create their sitemaps.

I think links will always play a role...just like title tags still play a role. Sure, the importance of user data will increase in the algorithm over time but unless there is some kind of new technology that drastically changes how that user data is collected and applied, that's not going to happen for a long time.